Browsing PBH By Quotes

This is what the US economy has been reduced to: McDonalds reports that as part of its employment event to hire 50,000 minimum wage, part-time (mostly) workers, subsequently raised to 62,000 it received a whopping 1 million applications, or a Tim Geithner jealousy inducing 6.2% hit rate (h/t X. Kurt. OSis). Alas, the US economy is now so pathetic that the bulk of the population will settle for anything. Literally anything. And the saddest part: over 938,000 applicants were turned away.

Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Perhaps you feel it’s not the world that owes you something, but that you owe the world: you should bless it with more than your ecological footprint. You wish to promote sustainability and repair ravished lands—to conquer corruption and raise aloft the downtrodden, protecting who cannot protect themselves.

But if results do not satisfy—and given the magnitude of problems, how could they possibly—the integrity of your intent will be under attack. You could never do enough, and what you do accomplish is complicated by your privilege that thinks it can determine what indicates progress.

“Periodically I get a. irritated; b. furious; and c. depressed – usually in that order – by the legions of people willing to talk, give lectures, write books, organize events, start splinter parties and even try to politically organize by means of a technique which consists in taking the most basic things Karl Marx ever said, getting rid of the context that gave them their dialectical meaning and then turning them into excessively blunt instruments that always come down to some variation on “socially necessary labor time, surplus value, falling rate of profit, the bourgeoisie exploiting the workers.” One of history’s greatest philosophers and the one who, by far, had the most to say about social relations in a world dominated by economics, is routinely transformed into the author of a kind of phrase-book whose elements can be blurted out more or less at random on any occasion. The world view that results is crude and schematic, dominated by the factory which only figures marginally in contemporary Euro-American life (and please don’t fuck with me on this statement, not only have I worked in factories but I have also made efforts to visit and study lots of factories on several continents) and apparently ruled even to this day by Englishmen in black top hats smoking cigars and counting pieces of gold at night in their stone houses on the hill. What’s sadly absent from such a stripped-down and nostalgic discourse is most of the world, science, advanced technology, finance, education, transport, communications, consumption, aesthetics, party politics, welfare, corporate interest-groups, lobbying, and advertising, not to mention organizational forms, psychology, religion, the study of human motivations, war, law, criminality, deviance, drugs, the neo-imperial state, the infinite varieties of sex and sexuality, nature, cultivation, architecture, linguistic difference, ecological thinking, the role of ritual and art in shaping collective aspirations, the forms and constraints of individualization, etc etc etc – in short, all the aspects of human existence in society which Marx, at his best, was able to thread into each other and present as elements of a dynamic equilibrium subject to crises in which organized groups could possibly intervene, in order to wrest the measure of value away from its current masters and open up new spaces of existence in which far more subtle and generous forms of human creation and interaction might take place.”